Butternut Squash Bread Salad
"Roasted Butternut Squash Bread Salad" from NYT Cooking (subscription required) was last night's vegan dinner (tonight was leftovers). I am not wild about squash but this was a good way to make it appealing. I recommend doubling the sauce, and using slightly more bread than called for.
Most of what I have been eating this week, it seems, is Easter chocolate. Damn, there is a lot of chocolate in the house. Or rather there WAS a lot, on Sunday, and now there is considerably less, and I feel sort of icky.
But what I still feel truly icky about is plastic, so I raised the concerns from my last blog post to a couple of the people working on the proposed reuseable bag ordinance for my town. One of them pointed me to this piece, "Plastic bag bans can misfire if consumers just use other bags instead," by Rebecca Taylor. He noted that even though her piece covers the unintended problems with bag bans, it actually provides support for them if you look at the numbers she cited. For example, she stated that in CA there was a 12 million pound annual increase in trash bag sales after their ban, but does not spell out the flip side: there was a 28-million-pound reduction in plastic carryout bag usage. And while "12 to 22 percent of plastic carryout bags were reused in California as trash bags pre-ban," that means that 78% to 88% of plastic carryout bags were NOT reused.
Another point from this person was that we shouldn't focus solely on the climate change consequences of the bags we use: there is also the fact that plastics are degrading our natural environment, with all sorts of bad consequences.
All good points. I am pleased to have as many perspectives and data points as possible to help me wrap my head around this issue.
Most of what I have been eating this week, it seems, is Easter chocolate. Damn, there is a lot of chocolate in the house. Or rather there WAS a lot, on Sunday, and now there is considerably less, and I feel sort of icky.
But what I still feel truly icky about is plastic, so I raised the concerns from my last blog post to a couple of the people working on the proposed reuseable bag ordinance for my town. One of them pointed me to this piece, "Plastic bag bans can misfire if consumers just use other bags instead," by Rebecca Taylor. He noted that even though her piece covers the unintended problems with bag bans, it actually provides support for them if you look at the numbers she cited. For example, she stated that in CA there was a 12 million pound annual increase in trash bag sales after their ban, but does not spell out the flip side: there was a 28-million-pound reduction in plastic carryout bag usage. And while "12 to 22 percent of plastic carryout bags were reused in California as trash bags pre-ban," that means that 78% to 88% of plastic carryout bags were NOT reused.
Another point from this person was that we shouldn't focus solely on the climate change consequences of the bags we use: there is also the fact that plastics are degrading our natural environment, with all sorts of bad consequences.
All good points. I am pleased to have as many perspectives and data points as possible to help me wrap my head around this issue.
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